mICQ 0.5.1 review

mICQ is a very portable text-mode ICQ clone. mICQ is known to compile under Linux, BSD, AIX, HPUX, Windows, AmigaOS and with restrictions BeOS.

Originally written by Matthew D. Smith, a great part of mICQ has been rewritten by R?diger Kuhlmann, in particular the support for the new version 8 of the ICQ protocol that became necessary, the internationalization, the file transfer and some restructuring of the code.

Here are some key features of "mICQ":
login
login with both the old v6 and the new v8 protocol
register
register new uins and setup configuration with an easy to use setup wizard
password
changing password
reconnect
reconnects when kicked by server
contact list
complete contact list with several ways for a concise display of online/offline users
status
set status arbitrarily
messages
send and receive messages and urls
acknowledged messages
send ackowledged messages to clients who understand them
UTF-8 encoded messages
send UTF-8 encoded messages to clients who understand them
sms
send SMS to user's cell phone
user info
request and update all user and personal information
search
easy search command, can search by (nearly) any information
visibility
be visible to certain users even when invisible, or be invisible to certain users at any time
ignore
ignore certain users completely
chat group
request user from interest group and set own's interest group
events
can beep or execute arbitrary commands when other users go online, offline or send a message.
connections
can show a users connection info and last seen online time
peek
check whether someone is offline or just invisible
tcp
full support of v8 direct connections
SSL
supports SSL encrypted connections a la licq
Tcl
supports scripting via the Tcl scripting language
file transfer
full support of sending/receiving v6,v7,v8 (batch) file transfers
auto messages
auto replys if away, request and send auto messages
identification
recognizes mICQ, licq, Miranda, StrICQ, &RQ, alicq, SIM, Kopete, vICQ including version number, and YSM, libicq2000-based, ICQ 2001, ICQ 2002, Trillian, ICQ2go, ICQ Lite, partially ICQ 2000
history
writes a log of all messages to and from a user
debugging
easy debugging by selecting what data to display, including concise packet monitor
i18n
translations include English, German, Serbian, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Japanese, partially Russian, French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian.
transcoding
transcode texts for Russian and Japanese users.
birthday flag
show if it is user's birthday
socks5
supports connections via socks5

What's New in This Release:
An autopackage is available.
Some preparations were made for MSN.
Bugfixes were done.
A few new options were made: peekme and autoauto.
Auto-expanding aliases were implemented.